


Will I Disturb The Universe?

by nothing_rhymes_with_ianto



Category: Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 23:23:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1282522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto/pseuds/nothing_rhymes_with_ianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prufrock talks to his therapist, but still nothing is clear for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Will I Disturb The Universe?

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for my English 210 final last December, in which we had to take something we read in class and rewrite it in a new form to explore themes. (For example, rewrite a poem as prose or a prose piece as a comic or something like that.) I chose Prufrock, and tried to keep it kind of timeless so that you don't really know whether it's in the early 20th century or the 21st.

There are fifty-seven tiles on the ceiling. There have been fifty-seven tiles on the ceiling of the office since the first time I came here. I suppose that’s a good thing. I still count them, because it means I don’t have to look her in the eyes when she asks me questions like

"Did you complete your goals for the week?"

"How are you feeling today?"

"Do you think you might be able to try something new this time?"

There are fifty-seven tiles on the ceiling and little black holes in each one, like oily eyes staring down at us while we talk. While she talks to me and I try to respond. She asks me questions and some days it’s all I can do not to chew through my fingers or my bottom lip and hide inside the meat and the sharpness to keep from sliding away from her. She says she thinks I have anxiety, that I’m wrestling self-loathing, that I need to work on socializing with people. She asks me what I did this weekend, if I tried anything new, so I tell her.

I went to a party; a woman I know invited me to it so I went. It was nice, I guess. The house was big and there were lots of people. But I just couldn’t say anything to them. I tried to open my mouth, but a cold stone crushed itself up against my throat and I couldn’t speak. I ended up sitting in a corner, because that’s where it’s safe, in corners where people cannot fix you with their eyes and tear you open to stare into your guts. People just kept coming and going from the room, constantly moving like waves or a tide and talking about Michelangelo and I didn’t _know_ anything about Michelangelo. He painted some ceiling somewhere in Italy, right? I don’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know anything. I turned into a victim of Medusa then, cursed and frozen. I had nothing to say and it was all very strange and loud, echoing and distant. Some ghost stole the air from my lungs and I couldn’t breathe, they smiled at me with their perfect white teeth and too much grin and I shook like a white narcissus turned gray and twisted. I followed my lungs out the door and walked home in cramping shoes because there was nothing else to do.

She asks me how I felt there, in that room with walls like the pink insides of a salmon and maggot-people crawling all over it and me, pinned like just another bug, and what do I say? What?

Trapped.

Muffled by faces sharp as they pass and then blurred again.

Wrapped up in rope and squeezed like a pulse.

Breath stolen by cigarettes and spirits as they rush past and pull at my throat, coat gone and tie crooked even though I checked it _every time_.

Thoughts whirling in my head but I can’t decide so I say nothing because what if what if what _if_?

Mouth open in a bubble of smoke, a wall no one else can see, and I’m choking on their tittering words and my creaking silence.

She makes queries about the woman, the party, the people, the meat-colored walls and smoking ghosts, whether or not it seems like a good idea to walk home through the dangerous part of town just to feel a little bit less like another ghost. There are still fifty-seven tiles on the ceiling. I go home with a list of goals and the souring memory of tea on the back of my throat.

My bedroom is a cradle. I don’t leave the safety of my house. It’s comfortable here. I can’t make mistakes. I can’t say things no one will understand. I won’t have to tell anyone that’s not what I meant at all, can’t you hear me?

I imagine going on a date with the woman from the party. She smiles at me and it’s a nice smile, not a patronizing one like all the others, and her wrists glint with gold. We have coffee and we talk about things, I don’t know what things, things I know about and can talk about. Not Michelangelo. Not the newest gossip about Mrs. So-And-So’s daughter. Her dress is white and lavender and a little bit lacy. I make a joke and she laughs and it rings like a bell, clear and absent of mocking or patronizing lilt. We finish our meal and she kisses me on the cheek when we depart and I smile and squeeze her hand.

It’s a silly little lie though, a misty dream full of perfumed scents I can never catch and fingers I won’t ever touch. So she asks me why I didn’t leave the house this week and I say I couldn’t. I can’t leave the house because there are so many decisions to make out there, and I am exhausted. If I go out, everyone can see me like I’ve been flayed open and the nervous designs on my ribs, the soft paunch of my organs will be visible to everyone like a vivid projection on the wall and they will all stare. My nerves will be raw and waving anemones in the painful current of the air, twisting and grasping for something soft, something to hide from all the staring eyes and grasping, clawing fingers. And they will all _know_ that I don’t know so I can’t go out.

What don’t you know?

The question answers the question. I don’t know. There is a whispered secret, something tightly held, something hidden. Everyone else knows it, but I don’t. They will not tell me. They whisper in corners and laugh together, they talk and smile and breathe and blink all the same and I cannot. It’s as if they all listen to the same radio station with the same information all the time, and I am on a different signal floating off somewhere in the Atlantic. My little boat is leaking and an albatross hangs about my neck, for some unknown reason I cannot even pick out. There’s some great something that everyone else knows, some secret I am not privy to and they know it, and they can tell. I don’t know what I don’t know.

I did go out on a date. I went out with the woman from the party. I read all about Michelangelo before I went. I learned the names of all his paintings, where they were, trivia about his history. I waited for her to mention him. Michelangelo, I mean. I waited. I waited but she didn’t say anything so I counted how many times I stirred my coffee. The spoon clinked against the side of the cup, a bell on the buoy that floats where people don’t want to get to close to me because they see.

Because they will see. They’ll see that I don’t know the things they do, that I stumble about while they stand on two sturdy feet. They will see the dim state that I am in, crumbling skin and twitching corpse-raw hands, an old house’s stammer and groan, staring out at everything like some terrified tearful shock. They’ll grin wider and laugh. They’ll see my tears, my shaking fingers, my trembling voice, my crooked clothes. They don’t laugh at jokes, they laugh at tragedies. They laugh at me.

Oh, but I did say something nice when we left the restaurant. It was foggy out, really very pretty. I said it reminded me of a patient etherized upon a table. You know, groggy and whited-out and cold? Like it could be cut by a knife to show the clear?

"Why don’t you try something else next time?"

See? Mistakes. That’s not what I meant at all, not like that. I didn’t mean it like that. Everything I do or say runs away from me, and I’m left alone here, wishing I could just grab everything and squeeze it all into something I can hold, something I can handle. It’s why I don’t— I can’t— It’s why I don’t do the things everyone else does, why nothing seems to make sense. It all falls apart and scatters away from me.

There’s something out there that I don’t understand. Not some strange cthonic creature with black eyes and unimaginable visage, although that might be true as well; no, there is something out there that I am blind to, that I have been manipulated into not seeing. Everyone else knows it’s there, knows what it is, hears what it tells them, and I know nothing. Perhaps I am still trapped in the womb, this fleshy cage covering my ears, a caul round my eyes, gagging me, smothering. I don’t know but— I don’t know if I dare to ask. What if I’m not supposed to know? What if? It exhausts me, just thinking about it. More than that, I am afraid. I’m not sure I want to know what they all know. It doesn’t seem to scare them, but I’m sure it will frighten me, whatever it is.

Still, I don’t know how to ask. I don’t know what to ask. I don’t know what I don’t know.

This time, she wants me to talk about talking. About wanting. What do I say to her? That I can’t speak because I can’t decide? My thoughts revise themselves every second of every day, stumbling and crying out as they fall and twist in and change. Do I tell her that my life is full of shortened breaths, my voice dying out before the sentence finds life, that I can only stand paralyzed as I think of speaking? To them. To her, to her, to anyone. Do I tell her that everything fails when I speak? That all the answers I get are stiff smiles and fingers waving my voice away over a shoulder, a careless murmured reply and a face turned away. I don’t dare to speak lest that reaction come my way and I freeze up and shudder, hide my face in my hands with a groan because I am a fool and that’s not what I meant to have said.

What is it about women?

I don’t know what to say to her. It’s everything. The way they talk and move, the skirts and blouses silky and fleeting. They look at me and open me up with knives and a small smile before seeing all my clouded organs and turning away. I can’t look at them for fear of turning to stone. I slide away from myself under their gazes like a night animal backs away from the sun. My veins squirm at the though of soft skin. My fists clench. All of me aches, is tight, is numb, is strange. And everything stops, stutters, I don’t— I can’t— how— I meant—

It might tear me apart, ragged bits of meat hanging from bone and soft flesh in the night and—

Mumbled yellow fog between me and them.

Light brown hair tucked behind ears and a smile I cannot read and skin pale like a pearl and I have to turn away because _what if_ , and _no_.

That’s not what I want. My body clenches and frightens me, that’s not what I _want_.

I should like to take a gentle hand, to feel a smile of fondness on my cheek. I want a mind more solid than my own, someone that can cut the fog to the clear. No talk of artistic theory or a gossiped life, just eyes I can look into without a shudder, and a smile without the mocking hint of disdain. I only want to stop feeling like a ragged ghost, or a jumble of meat-parts I cannot identify put together in a fashion to walk without thought or connection. There must be something there I can reach to, there must be.

Yes, there should be, but you need to work on yourself first.

What?

You still struggle with self-loathing, stilted emotions.

Fifty-seven tiles.

She wants me to look at her. She wants me to tell her about it. Why I think this way. What do I say? I tell her. I tell the ceiling. It’s not as though I cannot see the way they all look at me and laugh. It’s not as though I’m not aware that I’m useless and laughable and unimportant. People find me a humourous sad fop, a gentle Hop-Frog, useless to even his own advantage. I think I might have had more worth if I’d been born a rat or a crab, some trash-feeding thing with no other purpose but to clean up after others. I’m certainly ugly enough for it. People seem to agree as they pass. Sometimes I wonder if I only imagine them calling out for me to throw myself into the road, because, darling, it’s your only hope. Usually I think they’re right.

Yes, that’s what I mean, right about death. I see death every time I look in the mirror: these sunken eyes, stretched cheekbones, my teeth have yellowed and my lips have thinned. Maybe if I became fog, I could find something to touch and comfort, something to wrap myself around so gently. The beach is a lovely place to go, a fine and private place. Sometimes I imagine walking into the waves, letting them wrench my ankles away and spill me down into the depths, where mermaids can take me by the hand and lead me down to some darkness or to Charon on the other side. It may be better for all of us. No, it’s only the truth. Except I always wake up, every day, and it’s the same. Again and again and again and I can’t let myself go. The house is too safe, I cannot leave. The world only shows me what I already know. If I could hear the mermaids, I would go to them.

No, that isn’t— can you understand what I mean at all? It might be nice to be fog or water or nothing instead of sad and lonely and _me_ , trapped looking in at the windows of women’s lives. Forever a phantom trapped in a cave. No, I will not listen. Fifty-seven tiles.

I leave without my goals. I leave without anything left for her. I walk home in the dangerous part of town, it makes me feel alive, the oily smoke and men with grease-stained shirts leering out of windows. There will be time to lie in bed and think of everything and too much. Nothing will change. Time will not change. I will still turn old and grey and gone. I will still be invisible and dark. She cannot help. _She_ cannot help. The moment is nearly to its crisis, only a few steps more. A foot out the door is a foot in the sucking ocean of life, and there’s no chance at change. Will one tiny attempt disturb the universe? I don’t think so. I don’t know.


End file.
